I’d never heard of Filmstruck before. As someone who does PR, I’d say this social media campaign is a resounding success. Filmstruck started by tagging four big people in film, who cascaded the modern-era chain letter until people who weren’t tagged started joining in for fun. Now there are permutations like #GameStruck4, and people are wondering where that came from and tracing it back to #FilmStruck4, even if they missed seeing it over the past couple of days. Filmstruck has put its name in front of zillions of eyeballs, even if not everyone bothers to research and find out that it’s a streaming service for classic movies.

I thought about doing #FilmStruck4 yesterday, but it was pretty easy to pick four movies and then I felt too lazy to actually put the tweet together. Then this morning I saw #GameStruck4 and had to stop and think.

It’s been basically forever since I updated my blog. A lot has been going on, some good and some not so good. I had trouble finding a job I wanted and eventually had to settle for a low-income position at a hotel. That threw me into depression for the entirety of November. I was doing a bit better come December. However, I was still not great until I got a better job working for Stride PR, a PR firm that focuses primarily on indie games PR.

I have a list on Twitter that just has amusing accounts in it. Most of those accounts are ones I don’t actually follow. I want them around to look at them when I have the time and inclination to do so, but I don’t want their tweets clogging up my general feed for everyday use. There’s one exception: Peter Molydeux.

Peter Molydeux is a fake personality modeled after Peter Molyneux. I won’t go into the whole tale of how this fake personality came about, but it has its own Wikipedia article and can otherwise be searched online easily. What comes out of this fake account are some pretty outrageous and thought-provoking ideas for games, none of it fitting standard molds.

Instigating Tweet

Anyway, for the first time in several weeks, I was sifting through my amusing accounts list and came across a Peter Molydeux tweet from two days ago, which led to this:

The answer to this, for me, was obvious: Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, the final DLC for Borderlands 2. It’s quite possibly the best DLC I’ve played for any game. I would argue it’s also the best expansion I have played for any game. I can’t recall any other time I’ve cried at an FPS. The reason this one hits so hard is that what appears to be a riff on Dungeons & Dragons is actually a story about the character with the saddest backstory coping with loss.

It’s been a while since I did any updates regarding my phonics shmup; the stress of leaving a job and moving intercontinentally took its tool. When I stopped working on the game in April, I had broken it in magnificent ways. Now the broken is gone and I’ve added some colorblind friendliness features and built all of my phonemes in the way that Unity really wants: using GameObjects.

Finally back with another Let’s Talk About video, this time on Cornerstone: The Song of Tyrim. I like this game, but the devs had an overly ambitious plan for the budget they crowdfunded, and that makes this a great example of why we need both AAA and indie games. Transcript is below the break.

It’s been a while since I updated. To be honest, I don’t exactly remember all changes I’ve made. I’ve been working on it here and there in spare moments amongst busy times.

Many things have been refactored; I undid some unnecessary future-proofing I did in the previous update’s refactoring because it was silly and hard to read. I abstracted out some classes, either as their own files or as subclasses, making some code much easier to read. Again, not much has visibly changed with this new build, but I’m really happy with the progress I’ve made.